Manifesto for General Systems Transdisciplinarity (GSTD)

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Manifesto for General Systems Transdisciplinarity (GSTD) Dr David Rousseau, Centre for Systems Philosophy, UK Dr Jennifer Wilby, Centre for Systems Studies, University of Hull, UK Julie Billingham, Centre for Systems Philosophy, UK Stefan Blachfellner, Bertalanffy Centre for the Study of the Systems Sciences, Austria The ISSS was founded on an ambition to develop a systems transdiscipline, grounded in a General System Theory (GST), which could be leveraged to build a systemically healthy world that promotes personal dignity, human welfare, international cooperation and environmental stewardship. The ISSS pioneers saw this as an urgently needed response to looming human, social and environmental crises, which at least in part coincide with what we recognise today as the Anthropocene. This ambition and call to action remain as inspiring and pertinent today as they were when the ISSS was founded in 1956 as the Society for the Advancement of General Systems Theory. The crises anticipated by our founders are now upon us, making the founders’ vision and call to action more pertinent than ever. Over the last two years ISSS members David Rousseau, Jennifer Wilby, Julie Billingham and Stefan Blachfellner have been investigating the possibility of accelerating progress towards a General Systems Transdiscipline (GSTD). This was done by working with: • contributors to the ISSS’s SIG on Systems Philosophy and SIG on Research towards a General Theory of Systems in 2013 and 2014, • participants in a special Symposium of the 2014 European Meetings on Cybernetics and Systems Research (EMCSR), • participants in a special 2014 Conversation of the International Federation of Systems Research (IFSR), and • attendees of a 2015 Workshop of the Systems Science Working Group (SysSciWG) of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE). Based on these investigations, we believe that the issues that have in the past hindered the development of a GSTD are no longer significant, and new opportunities have arisen such that rapid progress with the development of a GSTD is now a practical possibility. In this presentation David Rousseau will present our Manifesto for General Systems Transdisciplinarity, in which we outline our perspective on why the development of a GSTD is still an urgent need for our times, why it is a viable prospect to develop one now, what we see as the key to opening the route to developing a GSTD, what a GSTD would look like, what it would take to develop such a transdiscipline, how it would unlock our potential to build a flourishing future society, and (most importantly) our call to action for: • the ISSS to renew its commitments to its founding ambitions, and • ISSS members to actively engage in the new phase of work towards developing, establishing and leveraging a General Systems Transdiscipline. We will announce the establishment of a broad-based community program of work towards fulfilling our manifesto objectives, and give details of how ISSS members can participate in this programme. .

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